How Bison Returned to Banff National Park
by Karsten Heuer;
foreword by Leroy Little Bear;
introduction by Harvey Locke
GREYSTONE BOOKS
2026/$28.95/192 PP.

Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once said he believed that “Books find their writers.” A book will come into being when it finds the writer most likely for the story. Viewed from this perspective, the Porcupine caribou herd found Karsten Heuer to tell their story in his 2007 book, Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, and his life partner, Leanne Allison, to film it in Being Caribou. “Karsten,” writes conservationist Harvey Locke, “was an adventurer with an enormous capacity for rough travel and an appetite to initiate big projects.” Heuer’s big project to hike and explore the possibility of a wildlife corridor running north–south through the west resulted in his first book, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears’ Trail. In his latest, Buffalo Lessons, he writes: “Y2Y’s vision to connect and protect reserves along the Rocky Mountains with wildlife corridors was so meaningful to me that I decided to hike its 3,400-kilometre distance, as a wolf or grizzly might, to see if the concept was possible. I discovered it is.” From the start, then, Heuer’s biology degree and his desire to see the world from the points of view of other animals coalesced to make him the perfect warden for the reintroduction of buffalo to Banff National Park, and an ideal storyteller for northern caribou and plains bison. As Leroy Little Bear writes in his foreword, Heuer and Allison were first “cariboued,” and then they were “buffaloed.”

The chapters are sequenced chronologically as the project unfolds and are titled as a series of the “lessons” Heuer and his small team learned both from experienced buffalo managers and from the animals themselves. Some of the titles sound managerial (“Seize Opportunity,” “Leverage Your Success”) and others more like insights into bison psychology (“Embrace Individuality,” “Make Your Idea Their Idea”). Given that an attempt in the 1970s by Parks Canada to restore bison to Jasper National Park failed when the animals dispersed way beyond the park, Heuer undertook a lot of research and preparation in advance. While the book might work too as a manual for wardens and ranchers, its scientific, ecological and even spiritual material makes it a compelling read akin to the works of Alberta naturalists Andy Russell and Charlie Russell, former park warden Sid Marty and UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard. It also reminded me powerfully of Freeman House’s Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species, another rich account of species restoration.

For a book that details the reintroduction of these animals, it is surprising when the prologue begins with Heuer having to shoot one of the buffalo whose life story he had been party to from its birth. But it has ventured beyond the invisible, largely unfenced boundaries of the park, a trespass the Alberta government will not forgive. Even prior to the first chapter, then, two deaths, both premature, have been recorded or anticipated: that of this young wayfaring bull and that of the author himself. Heuer wrote the book during the final months of his life, and it has been published posthumously. The loss of this man who, together with Allison, in essence apprenticed himself to other-than-human animals to understand their specific ways of being, is deeply tragic.

Throughout, Heuer details the remarkable amount of labour involved in this ambitious project. I was blown away by the physical work, skill range and stamina demanded of the wardens, and the logistics. Heuer had to plan for everything from age, number, biological sex and genetics right down to rubber tubing for the animals’ horns so they would not gore one another during transport from Elk Island to Banff National Park. First Nations’ managerial and spiritual expertise with the buffalo were also integral to this project of ecological restoration and reconciliation. Heuer writes that when not sorting animals “I helped erect teepees, partook in pipe ceremonies and listened to prayers, speeches and songs to bless the animals and the upcoming transfer [from Treaty 6 to 7]…. Looking across the teepees and feeling the drumbeats of Native singers in my chest, I saw I was just a Parks Canada pawn in something much larger about to play out: the prophecy of bison returning from the sky and the mountains.” Anishinaabe writer Richard Wagamese characterized humility as “the ability to see yourself as an essential part of something larger. It is the act of living without grandiosity.” This sense of humility with which Heuer approached the world, allowing him to enter at times into profound relationship with the land, also finds ironic expression in his mildly self-deprecating humour about his role in parks bureaucracy and playing “poker” with wily bison.

Buffalo Lessons does not aspire to didacticism but to be a gift to those who come after in the same way as the buffalo are a gift to the land and the people who live here. Printed on FSC-certified glossy paper with lots of photographs of the bison and some of the wardens, including Heuer, who reintroduced the animals into their ancestors’ territory and witnessed how they transitioned to a free-roaming life in the mountains, this book represents only part of Karsten Heuer’s legacy of science, activism and commitment to the multispecies world we inhabit, whether we realize it or not. Buffalo are now living wild in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta!

Pamela Banting writes articles about park warden literature, multispecies studies and ecocriticism.

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The post Buffalo Lessons appeared first on Alberta Views.

Canmore’s transformation story started over 50 years ago, which makes it a very long and convoluted tale. Let’s start in the early 1970s, when Canmore (pop. ~1,500) was still a coal-mining town, its residents waiting with trepidation for the inevitable closing of the mine, which would happen in 1979. Seeing the end of coal, the responsible men in Edmonton began to execute a plan to maintain the Bow Valley’s role as the little economic engine that must.

In 1973 the provincial government held public hearings about the future of what was then known as the Canmore Corridor. It is unclear how much of the local public knew about the hearings or what the locals thought they wanted, but according to the Calgary Herald, “individuals and groups eager to cash in on what might become Alberta’s Golden Valley” had submitted more than 30 different development proposals. “If even half of the schemes become a reality,” the Herald opined, “the narrow corridor of semi-wilderness would be transformed into a commercial jungle.”

In the 50 years since those words were printed, Canmore (pop. ~14,500) has been transformed from a drive-by town Calgarians only stopped at on their way to and from Banff if they’d forgotten to fill up with gas, into an international tourist destination bending inexorably to the will of wealthy jet-setters and the people who serve their interests. (This probably explains why it’s the most expensive place to live in all of Alberta and much of Canada.) When Tucker Carlson came to Alberta in late January 2024, it was Canmore where he dined with our illustrious premier, Danielle Smith. Whose house they visited is unknown, but I’m guessing it was no one opposing what has certainly become a jungle of the most commercial kind.

The cumulative social, economic and environmental effects of this jarring transformation are largely why, in the spring of 2021, Canmore Town Council turned down two development plans, known formally as the Three Sisters Village Area Structure Plan (ASP) and the Smith Creek Area Structure Plan. These were brought forward by the latest of several iterations of the company that owns the Three Sisters lands, which sit below the photogenic eponymous mountains in the southwest corner of Canmore’s jurisdiction. The main rationale for council’s rejection was that the enormous scale and scope of the developers’ new plans looked nothing like the project that was initially proposed and then approved with conditions by the Natural Resources Conservation Board in 1992, and so all six councillors deemed the plans “not in the community’s best interests.”

The original vision for the property, boldly declaimed in the original company’s name, Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc., was a grandiose proposal for luxurious hotels and several 18-hole courses, a commercial development that would have provided the owners with fat profits and the town’s residents with jobs and a meaningful commercial tax base, as well as housing for a few thousand new, mostly part-time residents. Three Sisters and the Town worked out an agreement to guide development and, in 2004, council approved the Smith Creek and Resort Centre ASPs, which reflected the commercial golf resort nature of the NRCB approval, along with 2,729 housing units, roughly the same number as in all of the Banff townsite.

Alas, it was not to be. After a decade of financial mismanagement and bankruptcies—when just a few dozen houses, including Three Sisters Golf Resorts owner Blair Richardson’s 11,000-ft², $11-million “European-styled castle,” and two golf courses had been built—the original owners repurchased the company out of receivership for pennies on the dollar and began a years-long campaign to amend the originally approved ASPs. Fast forward to 2021, when Three Sisters Mountain Village, the new company, proposed something wholly different: a largely residential development of up to 7,000 units of mostly trophy homes, basically a second townsite roughly equivalent to the size of three Banffs. The extra 4,000+ homes would be built on an area previously set aside as a “wildlife buffer.”

The Town can’t stop a private landowner from building 7,000 mostly trophy homes.

Shocked at such temerity, a small army of Canmorites, many of whom had lived there for 20 years or more, decided this change was too much. The proposed development would consume the Bow Valley’s last remaining viable wildlife corridor and double the population of Canmore, making it unrecognizable from the already busy and insanely expensive though still somewhat authentic community it is today.

People were also concerned about the economic consequences of the proposed expansion, which presented significant long-term financial risk for the Town of Canmore. Roderick de Leeuw, a current Canmore resident who worked for Three Sisters in the late 1990s and served as the chief financial officer for the Town from 1999 to 2010, said the proposed new ASPs could create “significant net negative fiscal impact for the Town’s finances (that) continue to put pressure on the municipal tax rates.” A big part of the reason why the town had approved the initial Resort Centre ASP was the commercial tax base it would create. Construction and maintenance of residential infrastructure—roads, sewers, water—is expensive, and without the additional revenues from business taxes, the municipal taxes paid by residents, already high, would only increase.

De Leeuw’s comments came as part of a seven-day public hearing where more than 200 very engaged residents provided 110 hours of testimony, 95 per cent of which was critical of, even hostile to, the Three Sisters Mountain Village proposals. So, it’s perhaps not surprising that when the time came, Canmore’s town council overwhelmingly rejected first the Smith Creek ASP, in April 2021, and then, a month later, the Three Sisters Village ASP.

“I have to agree with my fellow councillors; I will not be able to support this,” said Esmé Comfort, a 40-year resident of Canmore and the oldest member of council. “We have to keep our heads clear and set aside our bias and look at the facts…. I tried to do that. I tried to approve this plan in my own mind, because it would get rid of the uncertainty. But it felt like putting on a pair of shoes that were too small. There were too many things that were not addressed.”

The lone supporter was a shocked Mayor John Borrowman, a potter and small businessman who had moved to Canmore in 1974 and who wanted desperately to bring an end to three decades of tumult. “I’m disappointed, of course. I saw this as an opportunity to bring some balance to our community…. The growing imbalance, particularly the social imbalance that we experience today in our community is, in my opinion, going to get worse. But I certainly will support the decision of council. Council’s decision is always right, whether or not I voted the same way as the rest of council.”

Many Canmorites celebrated as if they’d just won the World Cup. Karsten Heuer, a long-time Canmore resident and wildlife biologist for Parks Canada, said he was elated at the development’s rejection. “We were reminded that democracy still works in Canmore,” he told the Calgary Herald. “It was a huge outpouring of concern in the last five months.”

By the time I moved to Canmore in the late 1990s (pop. ~10,500), hoping to settle down and raise my soon-to-be daughter there, the benches above the valley bottom where the old town sits were a sea of brand-new, mostly fancy houses (of which I rented one of the most modest). The infamous Peter Pocklington had built Rundleview Estates on the west side of the valley shortly before the world arrived on Canmore’s doorstep for the 1988 Winter Olympics. Over the next decade, construction continued non-stop on the benches along the northeast side of the valley, with obligatory names reflecting the natural values that were literally being torn up and paved over: Silvertip, Benchlands, Eagle Terrace, Cougar Point (and Creek) and so on.

Meanwhile, the growing population of Canmore—including and especially the concerned environmentalist types, which included me—was spreading out in every direction. Not content with enjoying the views and counting the birds, we experienced the forests and mountains by foot and wheel and ski, running and rolling and gliding on a network of trails that seemed to grow exponentially each time the earth made its way around the sun.

At around the same time as provincial government officials started eradicating trails and closing some areas to recreation to ensure the wildlife corridors remained functional, unknown monkey-wrenchers, armed with more than passing knowledge of the workings of heavy machinery, poured sand into transmissions and hydraulic lines, and corrosive chemicals into fuel tanks. They ruined eight backhoes, loaders and bulldozers on Three Sisters land, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, slowing (but not stopping) the construction of the next subdivision to be added to Canmore’s ever-expanding waistline.

A big part of the conflict was that the provincial government had never bothered to develop a long-term land-use plan for the Canmore Corridor or conduct a meaningful environmental assessment on any of the developments, except for Three Sisters. The Bow Valley became the same kind of free-for-all that also plagued other areas during Ralph Klein’s tenure as premier, most notably the reckless expansion of the oil sands in the 1990s and 2000s.

For locals such as Ron Casey—who moved to Canmore as a young electrician in 1973 and would eventually become a town councillor, the longest-tenured mayor in the town’s recent history and an MLA of the Progressive Conservative persuasion—the rapidity with which the provincial government sold land to developers made it almost impossible for the local government to keep up with the onslaught of development proposals.

“Certainly, in the late ’80s, early ’90s, there was almost the sense of being under siege. You had people coming in that had way more capacity than anyone locally had ever dreamed would show up on our doorstep,” he said, in a frank interview with Jeremy Klaszus on the Sprawlcast. “And there was a bit of concern in the community that we were being outweighed, that these people were all politically connected… and they had way more capacity to deal with the province, to manipulate some of the outcomes that the community wouldn’t have the same say in.”

Although nothing was ever proven, the fire sale of Bow Valley public land after the 1988 Olympics reeked with the stench of corruption.

It has become the same kind of free-for-all that plagued other areas in Klein’s tenure.

In 1989, the year Ralph Klein was elected as an MLA and became environment minister, the Canmore Alpine Development Company bought “a remarkable piece of [public] land” just north of downtown Canmore, on the lower slopes of Mount Lady Macdonald. The majority owner of CADCO happened to be Hal Walker, a major PC fundraiser and Klein’s political adviser and dear friend, who would later go on to become a key figure in the rise of the Wildrose Party. Klein apparently exempted Walker’s SilverTip golf resort, located right on the boundary of Banff National Park, from an environmental review, even though the Three Sisters golf resort would need to undergo a review by the Natural Resources Conservation Board that Klein had recently created.

Walker, who was the president of Klein’s Calgary-Elbow constituency at the time, denied that his political connections had anything to do with his get-out-of-environmental-review card. In the 1992 Legislature, NDP MLA John McInnis asked the now-premier about this apparent conflict of interest and said “this sort of half-baked, piecemeal approach will result in numerous lawsuits and possibly another federal environmental review at the end of the day.” Klein just shrugged it off. “The hon. Member for Edmonton-Jasper Place is talking about a fine gentleman, one of the finest gentlemen to walk the face of the earth, which is a lot more than I can say for this individual,” Klein said. “With respect to Canmore Alpine Development, that project was initiated in 1986, long before the NRCB was a notion. The proponent played by all the rules of the day. This member would have that proponent go back and be subjected to rules that were put in place long after he received all the permits and the necessary regulatory approvals that were required at that time.”

Klein’s contempt for the injustice of retroactivity, however, was apparently one-sided. Meanwhile, Three Sisters investors, 66 of what the Calgary Herald called “powerful and politically well-connected business people”—including Richard Melchin, whose brother Greg would become a three-time PC MLA and energy minister; one-time mining minister Bill Dickie; and Calgary Olympic Committee president Frank King—had become worried the Town might interfere with their ability to develop the lands. So in 1995 Klein’s government decided to provide some much-needed security for the Three Sisters cabal, amending the Municipal Government Act (MGA) by adding section 619, which gives the province, not the town, jurisdiction over projects that have been approved by the NRCB. Although the NRCB’s Three Sisters decision had been made three years earlier, s. 619, now known as the Canmore Clause, was made to apply retroactively to all NRCB decisions.

Just like that, the Town’s ability to determine its own fate had been neutered.

In rejecting Three Sisters’ 2021 development plans, Canmore’s councillors understood what many of the more strident opponents of the development didn’t: this wasn’t the end of the battle, not by a long shot. The issue was not development or no development. Three Sisters still had approvals from 2004 for the Resort Centre and Smith Creek, and they were well within their rights to bring amended versions back to council again and again until a mutually beneficial compromise was reached. One of the sentiments expressed time and again by the councillors was that they weren’t opposed to development, but the size and scope of the proposal was overwhelming. The development needed to meet the needs not just of the developer but of the community, to make the community, as it saw itself today, better.

Blair Richardson and Don and Dave Taylor, the owners of Three Sisters, didn’t see it that way. Surely aware of their privileged position in Alberta’s oligarchical tradition, they must have decided they’d already made their final offer and were done negotiating. They immediately appealed council’s decision to the Alberta Land and Property Rights Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body much like the NRCB. They also filed a $161-million lawsuit against the Town of Canmore. Named in the suit were all the councillors who voted against the plans—Esmé Comfort, Jeffery Hilstad, Joanna McCallum, Karen Marra, Vi Sandford and Robert Seeley. Even mayor Borrowman made the list, though he was the only one to vote to approve the Three Sisters Village ASP.

The rest was a foregone conclusion. Six months later, in May 2022, the Tribunal reversed Canmore council’s decisions and mandated that the two Three Sisters ASPs be allowed to go ahead. The Town appealed, but the Alberta Court of Appeal eventually concurred with the Tribunal. Canmore could not prevent a private landowner from building a large residential development that would double the size of the town, because, the logic went, the NRCB had assessed and approved a golf resort 30 years ago.

In Canmore, October 24, 2023, will go down in infamy. On this day the newly elected councillors gathered to approve, against their will, the court-ordered Three Sisters ASPs. It was like a scene out of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First, the members of the previous council who had been re-elected—Joanna McCallum, Karen Marra and Jeff Hilstad—recused themselves and left the room because they are still being sued by Three Sisters Mountain Village, and their lawyers had told them the less said the better.

Sean Krausert, a long-time resident and the new mayor, who, when the ASPs were rejected in 2021, had opined that “the right decision is being made!,” gave a longish speech to, in his words, “reflect on how we got here.” Specifically, Krausert, a lawyer, wanted to express his concern about the locals who were complaining the process had been “undemocratic” and those who suggested the mayor and council should resign rather than approve the ASPs.

That’s “easy for someone to say who has not been elected and [doesn’t have] a fiduciary duty to the municipality to uphold,” said Krausert. “It’s also easy for someone who is not subject to a code of conduct or obligations under the MGA; it’s easy for someone who does not face legal ramifications, whether that be contempt of court or potential civil liability or bolstering lawsuits already against the municipality. And what would be accomplished by such Nothing. The ASPs would still get implemented, but only after Municipal Affairs comes in to handle things, which will serve no one.”

Each of the three remaining councillors said their piece. Two of them, Jeff Mah and Wade Graham, were reluctant to vote yes but knew they had no choice. When it was time to vote, Mayor Krausert suggested they use “a little bit of a different system” this time. Instead of hands or speech, which would be captured forever in the video record, they would use their microphone lights, which would not be visible. “Light on if you’re in favour, leave it off if you’re not.” Lights on won.

Canmore’s inability to fend off unsustainable development is the norm in this province.

Canmore’s giant new development is “the biggest bait and switch ever,” wrote Jacob Herrero in an email to me. Herrero’s family moved to the town in the 1970s, when his father started studying grizzly bears in Banff National Park, and he still lives there today. He’s an environmental scientist and engineer, and has crunched the data in the various ASPs. “It starts out as Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc. proposing multiple golf courses, conference facilities etc.… and morphs into plain-vanilla urban development, something the NRCB isn’t even supposed to review.”

Last October a group of about 20 Canmorites with Bow Valley Engage, frustrated at the undemocratic nature of the regulatory process that approved Three Sisters Mountain Village’s new plans, drove to Calgary and parked themselves in front of Don Taylor’s Mount Royal mansion with signs reading “Stop TSMV” and “Save Grizz Corridor.” Five police cars soon showed up.

Karsten Heuer was among the demonstrators, and he knew they were well within their rights to protest against the negative impacts of the project. “We’ve been pushed to the extent that we feel it’s time to actually air this thing out for what it is, and who the people behind it are,” he told The Narwhal. There are bronze statues of grizzly bears and elk on the Taylors’ lawn, he pointed out. “Those are the very things they’re putting at risk” by shrinking wildlife corridors, he said. Heuer is backed up by recent research in the Bow Valley, which shows connectivity has already been reduced to 21 per cent for grizzlies.

The Canmorites’ exercise of their Charter right “to participate in peaceful demonstrations and protests,” including on public streets, sent Blair Richardson into a paroxysm of outrage. “It’s essential to ask who these people are and whether they respect the principles of the law and unbiased court decisions,” he wrote in an open letter published in the Rocky Mountain Outlook. “Given the immense contributions of the Taylor family to Alberta and Canada, such treatment appears immoral, unjust and unethical.”

And then Richardson threatened his fellow Canmorites with a reminder of Three Sisters’s $161-million lawsuit that has “the potential to severely impact the financial stability of the town”—above and beyond the residential-heavy, commercial-light development he has foisted upon Canmore—“and residents’ tax obligations. With the benefit of the previous legal decisions in favour of Three Sisters, it is likely that financial damages will be awarded to Three Sisters.”

This sort of rhetoric sounds suspiciously old-fashioned and authoritarian, a frustrated Lord of the Manor chastising his peasant underlings for daring to challenge his wealth and authority. It also reveals a great deal about Richardson’s values and the rationale for the $161-million lawsuit against the Town and its councillors. University of Calgary law professor Shaun Fluker characterized the lawsuit as a SLAPP (or “strategic lawsuit against public participation”). According to the U of C Public Interest Law Clinic, filing a SLAPP is “a common tactic employed by claimants with superior resources or relatively easy access to the courts to force political opponents into a legal battle and intimidate them away from participation in political dialogue.”

“I think it’s noteworthy that the individuals named in the claim abstained from the council deliberations,” Fluker told The Narwhal. “So right there you’re seeing, seemingly, a connection between the litigation and [councillors’] ability to perform their public responsibilities. It’s highly problematic.”

It’s also an illustration of the privileged Conservative political culture that has evolved in Alberta over the last 50+ years, the same period of Canmore’s transformation from small town to billionaire wilderness.

I’ve lived in Canmore and written much about the political and economic machinations of Alberta’s conservative approach to economic development for the last three decades. It comes as absolutely no surprise that a grandiose real-estate mega-development that will largely benefit anonymous rich people, most of whom only spend a few weeks in town in any given year, prevailed over balanced economic development, a healthy landscape and a sustainable community.

Canmorites, especially those nature-lovers who moved to town long ago for the slow, quiet life of a former mining town on the edge of a national park, shouldn’t be ashamed at having lost the battle. They aren’t alone. The Town’s inability to fend off unsustainable development is the norm in this province. Decades of entrenched neoliberal rule has ensured that economic development and corporate interests always trump other aspects of the public interest. It’s the cardinal tenet of the Alberta Advantage.

Just listen to Chris Ollenberger, director of strategy and development for Three Sisters Mountain Village, rationalize the scheme. “This project falls into a category of provincial significance. It was deemed to be a project in the interest of the province, and so it has an order-in-council approval from cabinet that says this project will proceed,” he told Jeremy Klaszus. “The intent behind it was [that] if the entire province kind of thinks it’s good from the provincial government point of view, [then] a more localized subset of individuals wouldn’t be able to say ‘But we still don’t want it.’ ”

Alberta’s entire legal and regulatory regime has been specifically designed to both facilitate expedient development, be it of a subdivision or a coal mine, and provide the façade that it’s being done in a manner that is socially and environmentally responsible. This charade is necessary because, from the provincial government point of view, every major industrial project ever proposed—with the recent exception of much-needed clean-electricity infrastructure—is both “good” and “deemed to be in the interest of the province.” Inevitably “some localized subset of individuals”—a First Nation, say, that doesn’t want toxic leaks of effluent in its water supply, or a federal agency responsible for upholding federal laws, or the residents of a town that wants to salvage the last vestiges of a meaningful wildlife corridor—would prefer that, for once, their government account for the negative externalities of its reckless economic policies, but their concerns almost always fall on deaf ears.

Here are just a few of many examples during the same 30-year period that Three Sisters has been trying to build a golf resort, er, residential housing development, against the wishes of much of Canmore’s local population.

Against fierce opposition by the Piikani Nation and a host of Alberta environmentalists, the provincial government built the Oldman River Dam in the late 1980s and early 1990s to increase irrigation for commercial crops. Like development in Canmore’s Valley of Gold, it did so without an adequate environmental review or sufficient consultation with First Nations. The province also didn’t bother to get the necessary federal permits, and so one of the “localized subset of individuals” that didn’t want the dam because of its enormous adverse environmental impacts called the government’s bluff and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. And won.

Inconveniently for the provincial government, which fought the case all the way, the SCC ruled that the federal government had to conduct an environmental impact assessment, and when it did, the panel concluded “that the environmental, social and economic costs of the project are not balanced by corresponding benefits and… that, as presently configured, the project is unacceptable.” They recommended the dam be decommissioned “by opening the low-level diversion tunnels to allow unimpeded flow of the river.”

The Alberta government, even without the putative legal might of a Sovereignty Act, refused. Last winter the reservoir behind the dam dropped to its lowest level in 30 years, and, unlike during the pre-dam natural river flows, the MD of Pincher Creek couldn’t pump water from the depleted reservoir, which looked more like a desert than a waterbody.

Here’s another one, from about the same time. Against fierce opposition from First Nations and the residents of Athabasca, the Alberta government approved the construction on the Athabasca River of North America’s largest pulp mill, despite the fact the province’s Environmental Impact Assessment Review Board in 1990 recommended “that the proposed pulp mill should not be approved at this time,” because there already were several other polluting pulp mills on the Peace–Athabasca river system upstream from several First Nations communities. Premier Klein, ever generous to large corporations, also provided a $264-million interest-free loan as part of what he himself referred to as a “sweetheart deal.”

At the announcement of the multi-million-dollar gift, Klein, heckled by protesters over what they perceived as a gross injustice, clenched his left fist and gave them the finger with his right. He was sending the same message that any “localized subset of individuals” receives from the Alberta government when they oppose a damaging industrial project, though generally the message is translated into more genteel language, such as “nonetheless, it’s deemed to be in the interest of the province.”

Dozens of such stories emerge from the Klein era, but he is perhaps most famous for “revamping” Alberta’s environmental regulatory regime while a minister and then, as premier, loosing a largely unplanned and unregulated oil sands industry that turned northeast Alberta into one of the biggest and most polluting industrial sites in the world (though you’d never know it from industry and government propaganda).

Even Alberta’s reluctant mainstream media report on the gargantuan levels of pollution, the unsecured cleanup liabilities, on yet another cover-up of pollution leaking into the Athabasca River and risking the health and well-being of yet another of those pesky “localized subsets of individuals,” this time First Nations, whose constitutionally protected treaty rights have most assuredly been broken.

How was this allowed to happen According to James Heydon in Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm, it’s because Alberta’s regulatory system is designed to maximize economic growth at the expense of all other interests. As part of his research Heydon interviewed 33 current and former senior officials in the provincial bureaucracy and the oil sands industry. He anonymized the interviewees so they could be more open and honest, which allowed for some of the quiet parts—usually hidden behind a smokescreen—to be said out loud.

Participant B, for instance, from the Alberta Energy Regulator, made it very clear that once a major project gets to a hearing, it will be approved. “And none of that… [is] actively transparent. It’s not in the hearing room, we don’t issue notices, we don’t tell people this is going on. It just happens.” Participant F, a senior member of the energy regulator, explained it this way: “We’re a development regulator. We do want development to take place, we believe that’s inherently in the public [interest].”

For anyone who follows these issues in Alberta, Heydon’s book confirms what we already know by now—and helps explain how a proposed coal mine on the Eastern Slopes, which was publicly opposed and rejected by both the federal and the provincial governments, a decision upheld by three different courts, is still alive and well when it should be “legally dead,” as Nigel Bankes, a University of Calgary emeritus professor of resource law, put it. Instead the Danielle Smith government has decided that the mine deserves another hearing—just the latest workaround to ensure “development takes place” no matter the costs.

All of this should sound familiar. The irony for Canmore is that Klein’s philosophy, which created enormous wealth for oil sands companies and a great many of the people who have recently moved to or invested in Canmore, is also at the root of Canmore’s development dilemma.

Klein’s legacy lives on in the likes of Premier Smith, who, at Tucker Carlson’s Calgary event, proudly introduced herself as a defiant libertarian conservative. She was delighted in 2023, the hottest year in the last 125,000 years, to curtail clean wind and solar projects in Alberta while pledging to double production in the oil sands.

Canmore’s fate, I’m afraid, is sealed.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil and is now writing a memoir.

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Their NFB film Being Caribou earned acclaim at the Calgary International Film Festival, the Vancouver Film Festival and the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada, introducing this important issue to hundreds of filmgoers. In September 2004, Jennifer Esser, managing editor of Wild Earth, a magazine published by the Wildlands Project, interviewed Heuer about the journey, the film and the fight to save the Porcupine caribou herd.

JENNIFER ESSER: For five months you migrated on foot with the Porcupine caribou herd. What inspired you to make this trip?

KARSTEN HEUER: I had a three-season assignment as a park warden in the extreme northwest corner of the Yukon, in Ivvavik, a national park established to protect the Canadian portion of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving grounds. The Porcupine caribou herd—about 123,000 animals—is the same herd that uses the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for their calving grounds. Ivvavik borders the Arctic Refuge.

As I was experiencing this caribou herd coming through every spring on the way to the Arctic Refuge and coming back every summer as they returned from their calving grounds, there was always a curiosity in my mind: where exactly were they going What were they doing When they migrate through, they’re coming through for days. And it’s not just the caribou; there’s a stream of life that’s coming along with them, whether it’s golden eagles or jaegers looking for calves to pick off—or the grizzly bears ambushing them in the willows along the rivers—or wolves and foxes trying to isolate individual animals as prey. I couldn’t sleep when they came past: there’s 24-hour daylight and the dramas are happening constantly. When they finally disappear over the ridge, it’s pretty hard. The landscape that was full is suddenly silent, and you miss it.

I felt a yearning to keep going with them, which translated into a lot of research about the caribou. I learned more about the potential oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge that could threaten their calving grounds. What bothered me about all the stories, documentaries and articles was that none of them addressed what these caribou go through during their migration to the calving grounds and their return to the wintering grounds. The story of the caribou hadn’t been told.

So my wife, Leanne, and I (she had experience with migration as well while she was working on a film project) started hatching this crazy idea to try to migrate with the herd, to try to be caribou. We decided to try to bring the landscape alive, telling a story through the eyes and ears and movements of an animal. Our intent was to move with the caribou herd for anywhere between four and seven months as they migrated and to try to become part of the herd. Because caribou don’t migrate along the same routes every year and don’t depart or arrive at the same times each year, we couldn’t really plan our route. We couldn’t plan food caches, since we didn’t even know how long we’d be out there.

That was a really tough thing to get our minds around—to let go of the very human approach of having goals and objectives and a plan.

Besides letting go and just following the caribou, what were some of the other challenges you faced?

Initially we were overwhelmed with all the unknowns, and our lack of experience in subarctic environments. We have quite a bit of experience in mountains below treeline in more temperate regions, but here we were going into one of the remotest places on Earth, having to put our complete faith in the caribou. As we slowly surrendered to the caribou, some wonderful things started to happen.

When we got to the calving grounds we had an incredible experience where animals were giving birth outside of our tent. We couldn’t move. They had become so skittish during that time that we couldn’t even get out to go the bathroom. So we’d go to the bathroom in our cups. We would have to wait until the animals had moved off a little bit and crawl on our bellies to the river to get water for the next two days and then crawl on our bellies back, and talk in whispers. For 10 days we couldn’t get out of our tent. They are extremely sensitive as they’re having their calves, and protective of their newborns when the calves aren’t that mobile. We saw golden eagles come in and try to get some calves. Grizzly bears came in and caused complete havoc.

We followed the caribou as they left and got into the bug season. We were moving so fast, among a huge rush of animals, that we were sleep deprived, traveling all hours of the day and night. We’d nap for an hour or two, walk for five or six, nap for an hour or two. Our whole sense of time got messed up. We didn’t know what day it was or what time of day it was because of the 24-hour daylight. We were constantly surrounded by caribou or behind caribou or on their fresh trails. They’re shedding their winter coats at that time, so we had hair in our food, hair in our sleeping bags, caribou hair everywhere, like you get sand everywhere when you’re at the beach.

And we were hungry. By that time we were two and a half months into the trip, and we couldn’t possibly carry enough food to replace the calories we were burning. Between this perpetual state of hunger and the sleep deprivation, we were quite dizzy, and it was almost like we were entering into a different state—much like a shaman might go on a fast and work himself into a trance.

We would lose the caribou once in awhile and, initially, we would to try to find them using an analytical method—visual tracking, looking for signs such as tracks and droppings on the tundra, and sometimes calling up on our satellite phone to other biologists, trying to determine where the few satellite-collared animals were. But as the trip progressed and we got into this unique state of consciousness, we started to plug into different signs and signals and we started to have vivid dreams and visions—of where we would find caribou next when we’d lost them. We started following those dreams and visions. We would tell them to each other before we headed out and then exact scenes that we had described to each other would play out.

There was also a vibration in the landscape, and it wasn’t from the hooves; it was more like a singing through the landscape. You felt it more than you heard it. We would hear it when the caribou were in large groups. It was subtle at first, but as the layers of our lives dropped away, our senses were sharpened. We started to tune in to this sound—which I call thrumming—and that began to inform our decisions about where we went when we had lost the caribou, and we would find them. It was a really magical development in the trip.

In the span of five months, these two white people from the city of Calgary, which is where we both grew up, had another dimension opened up to them. Our experience matches the description Gwich’in people talk about, a distant time when people could talk to caribou and caribou could talk to people. And we felt that—it was unbelievable. How do you come back from a trip like that and go to Washington, D.C.—which is what we did—and communicate that to Representatives and Senators and their aides How do you explain what’s at stake I think that’s what we’re really struggling with even now in trying to capture our caribou experiences in a film and in another book.

I imagine that experience permanently changed your view of the world.

It’s like Leanne and I are strangers in our old lives. Even the people that are closest to us, our parents, don’t really understand that we’re not the same people anymore. This other possibility opened up to us—and then we came back and felt it close again behind us. As we got inundated with all the advertising and everything else that fills the human world, we felt the barriers go up again, and of course we were cut off from that other world. The dreams and the visions and the thrumming stopped, and a big loneliness and depression came in to fill that space.

I think we experienced in a shortened period of time what many Native cultures have experienced over the last many decades—it’s a ripping from between worlds. Now Leanne and I are faced with the quandary of how we bridge back and forth—how do we exist in both?

Did you try to observe ecological patterns such as herding behaviour, and to understand the thrumming from a scientific perspective?

Certainly. You can envision the herd as different groups of hundreds and sometimes thousands of animals. At the calving grounds is really the only time when the whole herd—123,000 animals—is together. The rest of the time they’re split up into a few groups, but those groups co-ordinate their movements. Despite being hundreds of miles apart, all groups will shift and head south at the same time. There is a huge level of co-ordination. There’s some level of communication going on that we don’t understand, some communication that’s able to transcend those distances. I think the thrumming is an infrasonic wavelength, just on the edge of human hearing, which is also what elephants use to communicate over long distances.

There’s a story that biologists and First Nations people tell about how four bulls that were marked in this huge caribou herd came together in different places. It wasn’t always the same place, but it was always these same four bulls that came together at around the same time of year from hundreds of miles away from each other. There’s no explanation for that. There’s also no information about caribou communication in the literature, which is incredibly exciting to me as a scientist. I think some of the greatest discoveries in science are really mystical as well. They not only bring to light new facts about animals, but new dimensions about the world, and open up a new breadth of possibility. I talked about this thrumming to some caribou biologists and they were really excited, but I don’t feel the need to know the mechanics of how it works; it does work.

Migration might be understood not simply as a movement of animals, but as a flow of natural process. Can you tell us more about this river—not just of caribou, but of life?

When that caribou herd moves across that landscape, it’s towing an entire ecosystem with it. That’s what this idea of connectivity is getting at—allowing animals the freedom to continue to move, allowing ecosystems to be dynamic. There are all the obvious things that move with the caribou—the wolves and foxes and grizzly bears and birds—but there are things we don’t see, as well. For example, all the bugs that go along with them once the bug season starts. The caribou movement is dispersing these bugs across the landscape, and the bugs are feeding the hundreds of species of birds that are nesting on the tundra. The caribou are eating in one place and defecating in another, so there’s seed dispersal going on, and redistribution of nutrients.

When you start thinking about the services that 123,000 animals constantly on the move are doing, it’s overwhelming. The ecology is very complex, and the problem is to try to communicate all this to elected representatives in a way that their eyes don’t glaze over. What Leanne and I have discovered is that storytelling is an ancient human tradition and it’s part of our genetic makeup. What we’re trying to do is distill some of the wonder and this overwhelming complexity into relatively simple and inspiring stories to try to reignite awe about the natural world.

Are you working right now to try to influence policy-makers directly, and are you trying to educate the general public as well?

We have tried to lobby in the conventional sense—put on your suit, polish your shoes and walk the halls of Congress and Capitol Hill in D.C. and Ottawa and provincial legislatures in Canada—but you go into those meetings and the person has just had the American Automakers lobby there and you’re the next meeting and you’ve got five or ten minutes to communicate your point. Leanne and I have come to the conclusion that that’s not our strength. Our role is to inspire the masses and try to bring these stories to the bottom of the political process, if you will. We try to motivate and mobilize that constituency.

Is that what you’re trying to do with the projects you’re now working on—a film and a book, as well as ongoing speaking engagements?

On the calving grounds, Leanne and I had this terrible feeling we just shouldn’t be there, that it wasn’t right and we would never go back. The only way we could justify being there was by staying in our tent and by having a firm commitment to bring this story to a lot of people and to make a difference for caribou. We feel a huge responsibility to share our insights. The truth—which sounds kind of romantic and naïve—is that my heart is telling me to find a way to explore further what we felt with the caribou and the thrumming and the visions. But that wouldn’t mean we’d go back to the calving grounds.

I believe that that other dimension—whether it’s what the Koyukon Indians in the Yukon call distant time or the aborigines of Australia call the dream time—exists. My desire is to access it more deeply and to learn from it, but that’s selfish and meanwhile it’s at risk. We scientists talk in terms of minimum viable populations and connectivity and these relatively formal terms, but there is so much mystery. Now we have to try to communicate that it exists. We’re certainly not the first people to do this, but we might be able to help to bridge some distance between worlds—a mental distance. These are long journeys on the ground, but really they’re journeys from the head down to the heart. Our role is to try to help people along those journeys for themselves. 

Did you see evidence of oil and gas development, or was the territory relatively pristine Were there any barriers across the caribou’s migratory path?

We saw a bit of evidence of past oil and gas development: some old tracks on the tundra from seismic exploration, and a couple places where fuel barrels and firing wires and other debris from oil exploration was left. But overall you can probably count on your fingers how many times we encountered those things. We were in a huge, wild area—you can probably count the number of such places that still exist in the world on your fingers as well.

There were no trails, no roads, and apart from a couple of cabins and a ranger station, no human structures. Yet there’s all this history on the land: we’re following the caribou across these mountain hillsides and passes where there are trails carved into scree, rock and the earth that are like trenches. There’s caribou dung in layers and some of it’s covered in lichen.

Archeologists have identified some of the crossings that the caribou use today as the same river crossings used by caribou and native people to hunt the caribou as long as 23,000 years ago. So, what Leanne and I experienced was this very short segment of a huge circle of life that’s been going on for thousands of years. To describe it in numbers, to compare that kind of history to a six-month supply of oil for the U.S.—the highest estimate of oil and gas that could be under the ground in their calving grounds—it’s just a ridiculous decision in our minds. 

We know the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is at risk. What about  other areas the caribou use—are those mostly protected areas?

A lot of the caribou herd’s territory is protected. Ivvavik National Park and Vuntut National Park in Canada are directly adjacent to each other and adjacent to the Arctic Refuge. All of it is wilderness except for the million and a half acres in the calving grounds. There are some other agreements in place for much of the rest of their migration route. While it’s not the only one, the Arctic Refuge really is the biggest missing piece in the puzzle. We’re not very far from having achieved something really special here and it hasn’t come easy so far: Adolph Murie, Margaret Murie, Bob Marshall worked hard for the establishment of the Arctic Refuge. The intent wasn’t to have oil and gas development in the middle of it, in one of its most sensitive areas. This work has been going on for over eight decades and we really need to finish the job.

Are you hopeful that the refuge will be protected Do you think it’s a likely outcome?

It’s a necessary outcome. When I talk to people and get feedback after lectures and after pieces have aired on television about the trip, my sentiment is that the majority of people feel the same. So if development happens on the refuge, it will be a huge tragedy, not only for the caribou and for everything else that depends on that area, but also for democracy—because if it happens then democracy doesn’t work.

The post Being Caribou appeared first on Alberta Views.

The incident shocked many in this mountain community 100 km west of Calgary. Dubé’s infallible determination, courage, generosity and kindness had touched many lives, both in the classroom and on the trails. She was a hero for young girls and an inspiration for countless women; the grief and anguish over her death ran deep through Canmore households and schools. But for anyone who has lived here for more than a few years, the tragedy also raised an important question: has all the building and development here gone too far?

Wolf tracks are what led me to where Isabelle Dubé died: three sets of paw prints in a skiff of new snow, winding from Banff National Park across the slopes of Mt. Lady MacDonald on the outskirts of my hometown. It was January 2007, one-and-a-half years since the mauling, and I was there as part of an ongoing study of wildlife corridors for the Alberta government, trying to figure how (and if) the wariest animals—critters such as cougars, lynx, wolves, wolverines and, yes, bears—moved around the houses that have crept up the mountainsides. My head was down at the time, my eyes focused on the patterns of pad and claw marks, and then it appeared amongst the pine trees before me: a simple, engraved wooden cross. The wolves had stopped and considered it, too, circling a few times before moving on. I could almost hear Isabelle’s French-Canadian accent as she laughed at the injustice of it all: killed by a grizzly bear only to be pissed on by wolves!

The tracks continued east, taking me along the same path the three joggers had followed that fateful afternoon, albeit in the opposite direction. Although heavily used by mountain bikers, hikers and runners in summer, the Montane Traverse is all but abandoned in winter, and the saucer-sized wolf prints punctuated the snow in long, easy strides. Within a few hundred metres, however, the corridor narrowed and the animals’ gait changed. To my right, the bright opening of the Silvertip golf course’s uppermost fairway shone through the forest; to my left, the cliffs of Mt. Lady MacDonald edged closer. The wolf tracks now wandered, winding on and off the path in what became a circle, then eventually stopped in a cluster of overlapping prints.

In the dance of human/wildlife coexistence, wildlife are expected to learn the difficult steps.

Wildlife corridors are a relatively new concept. Prior to the 1980s, the predominant approach to wildlife conservation was to simply draw a line around an area, declare it a park or reserve and assume everything within it would be fine. But in 1985 a Ph.D. student from Harvard named William Newmark questioned that assumption and, after packing up his camping gear and notebooks, set off on a road trip that changed conservation history. After visiting 14 North American national parks (including Banff and Jasper) and poring over their records and archives, Newmark concluded they weren’t working. In all but one park, species had gone extinct.

The root cause was always the same: a rising tide of human development surrounding the parks, turning them into islands. And as islands they weren’t big enough. Too little space led to inbreeding and widespread disease. Floods or fires left little chance for the inhabitants to escape. 

The question that followed, of course, was how big do such islands need to be Over the following years, some radio-collared animals hinted at an answer: a lynx travelled more than 1,100 km from the Yukon to central British Columbia; a bull trout swam 1,500 km toward the Arctic; a grizzly bear ambled more than 500 km from the interior to the Pacific Ocean; and, most unbelievably, a young female wolf went from the Canmore area to Montana, then Idaho, then up to south-central British Columbia before looping back to Alberta, covering an area 20 times the size of Banff National Park! 

The scale of such movements aligned well with what geneticists, population ecologists and mathematicians were discovering over the same time period: to ensure the long-term survival of a given group of animals, at least a thousand individuals need to interact freely. Such a number translates to reasonably small chunks of land for species such as mice and garter snakes, but for wide-ranging animals the area is enormous: around 600,000 km² for grizzly bears and wolves, according to one estimate, which is about the size of the entire province of Alberta.

Such a mega-park is politically and economically infeasible. But what about wildlife corridors What about linking undersized parks into a network of reserves that collectively provide what no park can on its own These were the questions thrown around by a group of international conservationists, scientists and visionary economists gathered at an Alberta forum on Rocky Mountain ecology in 1992. The Yellowstone to Yukon vision, or Y2Y as it’s come to be known, was born.

I was so intrigued with Y2Y that I decided to hike the region. Taking a two-year leave of absence from my job as a national park warden and wildlife researcher in 1998 and 1999, I set off to answer a pressing question: how plausible was this audacious initiative on the ground My method was simple: travelling south to north along the wildest route possible, I kept notes on signs of wilderness-dependent grizzlies (e.g., tracks, rub trees, stomps, digs, scat and sightings). Eighteen months after I left Yellowstone, I arrived in Watson Lake, Yukon, with an incredibly hopeful statistic: 188 days travelled, with fresh grizzly bear signs 85 per cent of the way.

There are still plenty of “hotspots of concern,” as we biologists like to call them. One of the biggest is the Bow Valley around Canmore. In the end, Y2Y was an elliptical journey: after walking much of the continent, I returned to the problems of my own backyard.

Where the wolf tracks gathered, I stopped and listened. As always, there was the distant hum of the Trans-Canada Highway, but now, over it, came the thump of hammers and car doors closing, the scream of power saws and the shouts of kids. The Eagle Terrace subdivision. In another few hundred metres the golf course would end and the houses would be visible; the glint of windows and smell of barbecues would penetrate the thin sliver of forest right to the cliffs of Mt.Lady MacDonald and the canyon of Cougar Creek.

To my surprise, the tracks continued toward the pinchpoint, staying off the main trail now, winding through the trees. I wanted to charge ahead to see what had happened, but instead was forced to slow down. What had been a clean canvas of snow was now muddled with boot prints and dog tracks filing up from the houses below. Struggling to differentiate triangular wolf prints from the pug-shaped tracks of their domesticated cousins, I dropped to all fours. And as I did, I couldn’t help but think: how had it come to this How, in 15 short years, had one of only two narrow corridors around Canmore become so compromised that a biologist searching for signs of wildlife had to crawl on hands and knees?

Canmore, Alberta

Back in the 1970s, Canmore was a coal mining town of 3,000 people clustered along the banks of the Bow River. Gritty and unglamorous, it enticed few of the tourists flocking to Banff. But when Canmore Coal Mines Ltd. shut down in 1979, a trickle of outsiders came to settle, among them skiers and climbers attracted by the scenery and recreational opportunities. A few years later, when Canmore hosted the Nordic events for the 1988 Winter Olympics and received international profile, that trickle became a flood. In the 20 years since, the town’s population has tripled from fewer than 6,000 to more than 17,500 people (12,000 permanent, 5,500 second-home owners).  

Such rapid growth is part of a phenomenon gripping mountain towns across the globe. Attracted by the small-town atmosphere, clean air and water, low crime rates, stunning vistas and access to recreational activities, a generation of aging and wealthy baby boomers are flocking to these places, driving up real estate prices and triggering a building boom. And they’re doing it because they can. Freed from the traditional office environment by the Internet, an improved global transportation system and cheap oil, executives are moving from high-rises in New York, London and Toronto to home offices in Aspen, Zermatt and Canmore.

Wherever demand leads, supply soon follows, and Canmore’s housing market is no exception. There’s one complication, though: space. Bordered by Banff National Park to the west and provincial parks and cement quarries to the east, construction has only had one direction to go in this tight valley: up.

The bear that killed Isabelle Dubé was no stranger to local wildlife officials. Eight days before the attack, it was seen in the same corridor by a woman taking pictures of wildflowers, not far from the Silvertip Resort and Eagle Terrace subdivisions. Curious, the bear approached but stopped when the woman stood up, grabbed her dog and quickly backed away. When wildlife officers heard about the incident, they immediately set their traps, captured the bear and, after fitting it with a radio collar, airlifted it to a side valley of Banff National Park.

Like most relocated bears, it soon returned. On the morning of June 5, 2005, just hours before Isabelle and her two friends set off on their run, the 4-year-old male grizzly now known as Bear 99 was chased off the Silvertip golf course by a maintenance crew. Wildlife officers armed with radio receivers and rubber bullets arrived soon after, determined to instill some fear into the bear when it stepped out of the wildlife corridor back onto the fairway. It never did.

Although none of them realized it at the time, the bear, the photographer, the wildlife officers and Isabelle and her two friends were all participants in an intricate and dangerous dance initiated by developers, politicians and town planners decades earlier. To their credit, the planners had incorporated wildlife corridors into area structure plans at a time when no other jurisdiction in North America was doing so. But their power to make them functional was constrained by guarantees the provincial government had made to developers when they sold them the Crown lands in the 1980s. And so now, instead of the kilometre-wide corridors biologists recommended, animals are confronted with a convoluted maze of dead-end funnels and 300–500-metre-wide squeeze points on steep slopes. As is so often the case in the dance of human/wildlife coexistence, it’s the wildlife that are expected to learn the difficult steps.

I would have been pleasantly surprised if the wolves had somehow solved the riddle Canmore had laid out for them; if, unlike Bear 99, they had somehow found that elusive middle ground of tolerating human development but managing to stay wild. But after a few more minutes of crawling on hands and knees I came to a swath of undisturbed snow where the wolves had finally stopped and circled back. Their wildness had kicked in. The squeeze point had proved to be too much.

What had been a mild February day was turning cold by that point, and after confirming the wolves had gone back, I abandoned their spoor and headed downhill. My car was parked several kilometres away by that point and with the lights of my downtown neighbourhood visible in the valley below I decided to walk home. Two minutes later, I was crossing the Silvertip golf course, heading for the uppermost of the many housing developments that have crept up the mountainside in recent years.

Wildlife corridors link a network of reserves that together provide what no park can on its own.

It would be easier to justify narrow wildlife corridors if the houses that encroached on them were modest-sized and built for families who lived and worked in the community, but as I made my way downhill, the majority of the massive homes I passed were dark, their curtains drawn, and save for the tire tracks left by the local security company trucks, their snowy driveways were unmarked. For anyone who knew Isabelle or knows the plight of local wildlife, the irony is hard to swallow: most of the homes and golf courses that have plugged this narrow valley over the past 15 years have been built as second, third and even fourth homes for people who live somewhere else.

Had Isabelle Dubé lived, she would now be part of what local demographers and statisticians expect will be the last generation of middle-class people who can afford to work, live and raise a family in Canmore. When she moved here from Quebec in the mid-1990s, the average price for a single family home was under $200,000. Now, less than 15 years later, it has more than quadrupled to $850,000. Property taxes and rents have skyrocketed alongside real estate values, and an exodus of young couples and families has followed. School enrolments are decreasing, local businesses are struggling to retain long-term employees and the population demographics are shifting toward older people who have brought their wealth from elsewhere and second homeowners who, according to a recent survey, aren’t interested in getting to know another set of neighbours or contributing time to community programs and events.

Such trends aren’t unique to Canmore. In Aspen, Colorado, the average single-family house now costs $4-million and sits vacant much of the year, necessitating a system where the local workforce is bused in daily from more affordable towns an hour or two away. It’s an extreme case of how the free market can destroy a community. Residents and politicians in other mountain towns are taking notice. In Crested Butte, Colo., for example, a 2,500-square-foot cap on house size has prevented opulent trophy homes from taking over the town. In Zermatt, Switzerland, local officials have capped total second-home construction to a town-wide limit of 9,000 square feet per year. And in Basalt, Colo., deed restrictions, resident-only districts, appreciation caps, property buybacks and affordable housing projects have all been instituted to prevent what happened in nearby Aspen from happening there.

Canmore has considered some of these options—resident-only zoning in certain neighbourhoods, for example, and a 3,500-square-foot limit on house size—but hasn’t adopted them because of the Charter of Rights & Freedoms. Which invites the question: is compromising the lives of others (animals and humans alike) in order to own a second home a legitimate human right?

A motion-activated camera along a popular Canmore-area hiking trail captures two cougars just hours before capturing hikers. (Photo Courtesy of Melanie Percy/Alberta Tourism, Parks and Recreation)

Twenty minutes after leaving the wolf tracks, I emerged at the bottom of the Silvertip subdivision, crossed the Trans-Canada Highway and sauntered into Canmore’s downtown core. It, too, has changed in recent years—the local grocery and hardware stores are gone, replaced by real estate showrooms, upscale bistros and high-end furniture boutiques. I couldn’t help but notice the slogans as I walked past the realty office windows: Move Closer to Nature; Experience Luxury in the Wilds of Canmore; Silvertip: The Reason Nature Created the Rockies. Meanwhile, a different version of the same story lay on the slopes above me, written in the tracks of three wolves and a young woman’s memorial cross.

Fortunately, many citizens and politicians who know the whole story in Canmore are working to steer it clear of further tragedy. It’s why an exhaustive overhaul of the town’s principal guiding document (the municipal development plan) has been the subject of dozens of heated public forums and hearings over the last three years. It’s why an innovative sustainability screening is now part of the development permit process, putting the onus on the proponent to demonstrate a social, environmental or economic benefit to the community. And it’s why an organization called Bow Valley WildSmart formed soon after Dubé’s death: to better inform residents about wildlife corridors, bear safety and other issues regarding human/wildlife coexistence.

As well-meaning as they are, however, such initiatives skirt more than confront Canmore’s big problem—too many people trying to build too many big homes in too small a space. A cap on development is the logical solution, something that takes into account all we’ve learned from William Newmark and Y2Y about parks and the need for wildlife to be able to move between them, and from Aspen and other mountain towns ruined by excessive development and the proliferation of second homes.

What I and every other person who cares about this issue have come to understand is that change is as difficult to track as a wolf or grizzly bear, twisting and turning, stalling and surging, behaving in ways no one can predict. Change, too, needs corridors and sometimes our job is just to keep them open: corridors of hope between reservoirs of possibility.

It’s this belief in possibility, I think, that has helped point my journey in a new direction. Two-and-a-half years have passed since that February day when I followed the wolves past Isabelle’s cross. The economic recession that now grips much of the world has forced one of Canmore’s two major developers (Three Sisters Resorts) into receivership, creating an opportunity which our once-powerless mayor and council quickly pounced on. In a motion that passed unanimously this April, Canmore’s urban growth boundary was moved inward to exclude lands on Three Sisters Mountain, some 600 acres for which as many as 2,500 “dwelling units” had been slated. If the motion holds, approved growth in our stressed town will be cut by more than 60 per cent. According to long-time Canmore resident and current mayor Ron Casey, it’s a chance to undo some of the mistakes of the past two decades and reclaim a sustainable vision. “It really comes down to what the Town thought they were getting into,” he says. “This was never about building a second-home mecca residential neighbourhood.”

So Canmore is doing its best to wrest control back from at least one developer. It’s a bold move that won’t go unchallenged. Indeed, a public hearing about the motion was recently postponed because of legal threats from the receiver. Meanwhile, letters to push on despite the challenges are crowding the op-ed pages of the local newspaper and e-mail inboxes at town hall.

And when this challenge is over our focus will shift to the 100-acre plot where the other big developer—Stone Creek Properties—plans to build 1,000 condos, 300 hotel rooms and 100 shops. I know the place well. It’s up on the slopes of Mt. Lady MacDonald, not far from where wolves still try to get around the town. Not far from the spot where Isabelle’s spirit still lives. 

Karsten Heuer is a wildlife biologist, park warden and author of three books, including Walking the Big Wild (M&S, 2002).

The post The Big Squeeze appeared first on Alberta Views.

It shouldn’t have been this way. The last decade should have been a Dark Age. In 1993, we Albertans elected a Premier who—how can I say this nicely—isn’t one for reading books. Over the next 14 years, artists of all sorts would flee the province for want of support. A climate of disdain for culture precipitated the sale of local publishers to out-of-province interests (among them Red Deer Press, Duval House and Brindle & Glass). Add the rise of Chapters/Indigo and the near-disappearance of independent bookstores (a net loss of shelf space for local authors and publishers), and it’s a minor miracle our writers survived the past decade at all, let alone thrived. (For a taste of how government might positively stimulate its citizens’ creative output, read Fil Fraser’s Alberta’s Camelot [Lone Pine, 2003], which tells of a more enlightened era—Peter Lougheed’s.)

It’s no coincidence that Alberta Views’ first 10 years coincide with this era. Alberta’s history of one-party, one-voice domin-ance had rendered political opposition essentially mute. Into the silence strode Alberta’s “unofficial” opposition: beleaguered authors. In 1997, a government employee named Kevin Taft published Shredding the Public Interest: Ralph Klein and 25 Years of One-Party Government (U of A Press/Parkland Institute, 1997). The book—which argued that Klein’s government had made a systematic effort to obscure the truth about the causes of Alberta’s debt and deficit; that our “fiscal crisis” was, essentially, manufactured—landed with all the subtlety of a bomb. Albertans snapped up the entire print run in a week (and the 10,000 reprints in another 10 days). So devastating was its critique, the book seemed heretical. “A person from Grande Prairie said that a bookstore there kept copies of my book tucked out of sight,” Taft recalls. “As if it was a dirty magazine, customers could only get it by discreetly asking at the counter.” Even The Economist lauded the book: “Taft may be right… maybe the whole ‘Klein revolution,’ as it is called, was unnecessary.” Mark Lisac’s Alberta Uncovered: Taking Back Our Province (NeWest, 2004) and Trevor Harrison and Gordon Laxer’s The Trojan Horse: Alberta and the Future of Canada (Black Rose, 1995) also contributed to the debate. And while these continued to expose Klein’s policies, Doreen Barrie’s The Other Alberta: Decoding a Political Enigma (Canadian Plains Research Centre, 2006) went after a bigger threat—Klein’s mythmaking department. She argued that our provincial identity, to an extent unseen elsewhere, is socially constructed by our government. “It’s almost disloyal not to fall behind [them],” she said, noting how Klein and Co. would have us forget our province’s long history of political innovation, especially representation by women, and economic interventionism.

If there’s another topic as disproportionately covered by Albertans as politics, it’s the environment: resplen-dent collections of photos of the Rockies, thick geological tomes published for the oil patch, children’s books about the dinosaurs hiding under our feet, etc. But we’re not always so celebratory. Recently two very different Albertans reached the same conclusion: that we must resolve our oil addiction or embrace catastrophe. Calgary oilman Peter Tertzakian’s A Thousand Barrels a Second (McGraw-Hill, 2006) discusses the coming energy “break-point” and earned him a global audience (including a seat on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show), while writer/historian Ronald Wright’s Massey Lectures were distilled into A Short History of Progress (Anansi, 2004). Wild Country: The Best of Andy Russell (McClelland & Stewart, 2004) manages to celebrate our province’s breathtaking wealth and beauty and warn of the consequences of squandering them. Russell, of course, is best known for his film and book Grizzly Country (Knopf, 1967), the film capturing some of the first footage of grizzlies, the book dispelling the worst myths about bears. In Wild Country is Russell’s collected environmental writing, including his 1946 essay “Can Animals Think?” which Alberta Views reviewer Jeff Gailus noted was criticized at the time by academics. “What Russell has over most academics is a lifetime of experience,” wrote Gailus. “While the idea that animals can think seems self-evident now, it wasn’t always. Russell was a maverick.” Russell’s son Charlie continues his dad’s legacy. Grizzly Heart (Random House, 2003) and Grizzly Seasons (the latter a photo collection with Maureen Enns, also Random House, 2003) are equal parts inspiring and heart-wrenching in their depiction of grizzlies. Patricia van Tighem’s The Bear’s Embrace (Douglas & McIntyre, 2000) evokes similar emotions through the relaying of a very different experience with a grizzly—an attack that left the author physically and emotionally disfigured. Karsten Heuer’s Walking the Big Wild (M&S, 2002) and Being Caribou (M&S, 2006) are stirring accounts of his two greatest treks thus far: along the Continental Divide to advocate for wildlife corridors, and across the Arctic with a Porcupine caribou herd whose calving grounds are threatened by our society’s desperate thirst for oil. Both are sensational reads. Said a reviewer in the Canmore Leader, “It’s not often you close the pages of a book with a resolve to live your life differently. But such is the effect of Being Caribou.”

“Of all the writers working in Canada today, Robert Kroetsch is perhaps the one who exerts more quiet influence than any other,” writes Aritha van Herk. Indeed, the artist and mentor’s influence spans four decades to the present day; witness the echoes of schmier reverberating from William Neil Scott’s debut Wonderfull (NeWest, 2007). Through the nineties, Kroetsch continued to publish influential poetry, including The Hornbooks of Rita K (U of A Press, 2001) and The Snowbird Poems (U of A Press, 2004). Reviewers railed against the retirement alluded to by the title. “The lovely thing about Kroetsch’s ‘lifetime achievement’ is that it’s nowhere near finished,” insisted Chris Wiebe in VUE Weekly. “His masterful new book of poetry… resonates within and extends his earlier writing.” Van Herk allowed that it is “as brilliant a collection as any ever written,” but noted that the poems “document the world-weary tenderness of a man who has seen everything and been everywhere and who sincerely desires the relief and escape of a long sleep, a rest beyond the concept of rest.”

Writing in The Danforth Review in 2001, Lethbridge poet Richard Stevenson broke news of a new publisher promising to publish “risky, edgy work in any aesthetic”; four years later, Frontenac House’s Quartet series had so bloomed in prestige that Stevenson concluded it “must offer four of the most-sought-after slots in the poetry biz in Canada.” Publisher Rose Scollard’s bold mandate has borne such instant classics as Weyman Chan’s Before a Blue Sky Moon (2002), Sheri-D Wilson’s Re:Zoom (2005) and Nancy Jo Cullen’s Pearl (2006). Alberta continues to be on poetry’s cutting edge—Calgary boasts twin enfants terribles derek beaulieu and Christian Bök, the former a mad scientist of visual poetry, the latter only the author of the bestselling (and most maddening) book of poetry in Canada’s history—Eunoia (Coach House, 2001) is a univocalic (or lipogram) of such audacity as to render the genre completed. On the other end of the spectrum, cowboy poetry—a genre Albertans practically invented—is enjoying a renaissance, due in no small part to the lifetime work of “the grandfather of cowboy poetry,” Cochrane’s Lloyd Dolen, who passed away in 2004. Rhyming Wranglers (Frontenac, 2007) offers a wonderful entry point into the world of cowboy verse.

While our poets explore new literary territory, our fiction writers obsess over the past’s mysteries and secrets. For such a young province, we sure have a long memory. Witness Fred Stenson’s The Trade (Douglas & McIntyre, 2000), a lyrical tale of the 19th-century Canadian fur trade based loosely on what scraps of first-person accounts remain. Written “between the lines” of these accounts, the book brings an entire era roaring to life; if the goal of the historical fiction writer is to animate, amplify and give three-dimensionality to historical characters, The Trade is deserving of its many accolades (including the Giller Prize shortlist and the very first Grant MacEwan award). Stenson followed The Trade with Lightning (D&M, 2003), another historical novel, this one about the gruelling cattle drives from the US to Alberta in the 1880s. Grande Prairie native Thomas Wharton burst onto the Canadian writing scene with Icefields (NeWest, 1995); set during the first years of European settlement near Jasper, the widely acclaimed novel flows with a power and sublime beauty equal to that of the glaciers at its heart. Wharton did one better with his follow-up, Salamander (M&S, 2001). This story of an 18th-century London printer commissioned to create the “infinite book” is a dizzying tribute to the magic act of reading. While Wharton has few peers in ambition, even he must have stood in his local bookstore, mouth agape, upon first laying eyes on Calgarian Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides (Random House, 2004). Twelve years in the making and 1,376 pages in length, the novel is a hugely ambitious attempt to resolve the enigma that is 17th-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Wrote Alberta Views book columnist Alex Rettie: “Anderson gives us Baroque Mexico in all its splendour and squalor… Hunger’s Brides is a pageant for the mind.” Anderson dismissed a reviewer’s comparison to Gabriel García Márquez, saying, “To some degree, it was my failure to turn life into a novel that finally brought me to sit down to write.” The history in David Albahari’s Snow Man (D&M, 2005) is much darker. Albahari, a U of C Distinguished Visiting Writer in 1994, elected to stay in Calgary (his novel would be translated from its original Serbo-Croatian). The present-day narrator of Snow Man is an academic who flees a horrific, unspeakable past, only to continue to endure it as a form of torture; he barely copes with his mental and physical displacement. Stephen Osborne, in Geist: “One rarely finds a Canadian book, a North American book, that seems to belong to the literature of the world in the way that books by Sebald, Saramago, Borges and García Márquez seem to belong… [Snow Man] belongs precisely to such a narrative of the world.”

Albertan historians are interested in a staggering range of subject matter, and—in keeping with a provincial birthright—tend to add generous dollops of creativity to the tale-telling. It should not be surprising, then, that the most significant work of history published in Alberta in the last 10 years, or arguably the last century, was by a fiction writer. With characteristic modesty, Aritha van Herk wrote in her introduction to Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Viking, 2001): “I knew in advance that I would fail to provide any historical perspective sufficiently rigorous or knowledgeable to compete with the brilliant historians who have worked and continue to work on Alberta”; she resigns herself to her own “idiosyncratic and biased point of view.” Once its work is done, Mavericks will have completely reshaped how other Canadians see Albertans, and how we see ourselves. A very different set of myths is advocated by Ted Byfield, for decades the publisher of Alberta Report. Byfield’s passion lives on in his monumental “Alberta in the 20th Century” history series (United Western Communications, 1991–2005). Reminiscent of Time/Life hist-ory books, and invaluable to students and the public alike, the series is thorough and gorgeously designed (and has reportedly sold in excess of 225,000 copies). Another exhaustive work is George Melnyk’s The Literary History of Alberta, Vols. I and II (U of A Press, 1997/98). Melnyk—founder of NeWest Press, first executive director of the Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts, and Alberta book-lover without peer—has done a service to the province’s literature. His counterpart in the field of visual arts is Mary-Beth Laviolette, whose An Alberta Art Chronicle (Altitude, 2006) and Alberta Art and Artists: An Overview (Fifth House, 2007; co-written with Patricia Ainslie) are the result of a lifetime of study and advocacy. Of course, from a literary standpoint, history doesn’t get any better than Rudy Wiebe’s Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest (Knopf Canada, 2006). With spare, stunning eloquence, Wiebe’s memoir evokes his humble beginnings, his connection to the natural world, and his love of words and reading. Wiebe’s Governor General’s Award-winning The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and A Discovery of Strangers (1994) have worked their way into the very fabric of the prairie and the hearts of its residents.

While we’re hardly ones to seek outside approval, we cer-tainly don’t mind when Alberta’s contribution to the national conversation is recognized. After all, we’re most of us, like Andy Russell, “a Canadian first and an Albertan by choice.” If, one day, people look back on 1997–2007 as a Golden Age of Alberta Books, then November 12, 2002—the night of the 66th annual Governor General’s Literary Awards—should be remembered as its defining moment. To the surprise of the Establishment, which had its money riding on Carol Shields, Edmonton’s Gloria Sawai—still no doubt basking in the afterglow of the publication of her very first book at the age of 70—won the GG for fiction. It wasn’t as surprising to prairie-dwellers: many of the stories in A Song for Nettie Johnson (Coteau, 2001) had been previously published; some—like “The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts”—were widely anthologized. Sawai’s stories are honest and hilarious and shocking, often all at the same time. Her images stay with you for years: Jesus himself glancing over at Gloria Johnson as her kimono billows open—“a Saskatchewan wind comes up in a hurry, let me tell you”—and pronouncing her breasts “very nice.” Sawai has not published another collection and has no plans to publish a novel. In many respects, A Song for Nettie Johnson is all the more special because it so singularly encapsulates Sawai’s wisdom and magical voice.

Before the literati could pick their canapés up off the floor, another Albertan took the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. Andrew Nikiforuk’s Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War against Big Oil (McFarlane, Walter & Ross 2001) is more than a gripping tale of eco-terrorism and fanaticism, or even of a defensible struggle for justice on a Biblical scale (complete with Biblical characters). It starts and ends, of course, with Wiebo Ludwig; a more fascinating, sympathetic and infuriating character could not be invented. What could have been a simple tale—about the link between sour gas emissions and miscarriages in livestock and humans on a Trickle Creek farm—exploded into a crime story (industrial sabotage by Ludwig and others; the RCMP’s manufacturing of evidence), mystery (the unresolved shooting of Karman Willis), Shakespearean drama (the Canadian trial of the century, pitting individual rights against corporations), and tragi-comedy (Nikiforuk notes in his epilogue that more sour gas is flared in Alberta than ever). This book doesn’t just document events, it transcends them; the author is an investigative journalist of the first order and a storyteller in the tradition of W.O. Mitchell himself. Saboteurs stands as the beautiful and infuriating story of Alberta, writ large.

Evan Osenton has been the books editor of Alberta Views since 2004. He has lived in Calgary since before he could read. Originally published in the Jan/Feb 2008 print edition of Alberta Views.

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